The country is now being flooded with people on domestic worker visas. The Au Pair program is a fraud. In reality it lets cheap rich people bring in house servants directly from overseas. So we are being even more flooded by immigrants because the rich are too cheap to pay a decent wage to Americans. So-called au pairs are expected to cook, clean, and do all other household duties.

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legal categorization of au pairs as “cultural exchange participants” is strategically used to sustain – and disguise – a government-created domestic worker program to provide flexible, in-home childcare for upper-middle-class families at below-market prices. The “cultural exchange” subterfuge has created an underclass of migrant domestic workers conceptually and structurally removed from the application of labor standards and the scrutiny of labor institutions. On the one hand, the “cultural exchange” rubric enables the U.S. government to house the program under the Department of State rather than Labor, and to delegate oversight of this government program to private recruitment agencies that have strong financial incentives to overlook and even hide worker exploitation. On the other hand, the “cultural exchange” rhetoric used in the au pair program regulations and practice reifies harmful class, gender, racial biases and tropes that feed society’s stubborn resistance to valuing domestic work as work worthy of labor protection. Together these dynamics render au pairs vulnerable to abuse, and threaten to undermine the tremendous gains otherwise being made on behalf of domestic workers’ rights. The U.S. Au Pair Program: Labor Exploitation and the Myth of Cultural Exchange by Janie Chuang :: SSRN